Chapter Five
Maya
Behind a bar for the first time in my life, I discover that eight years of marketing metrics prepared me for nothing.
Ainsley walks me through the basics an hour before opening, pointing out the well, the soda gun, the specific shelf where the good tequila lives so I stop reaching for it every time someone orders a margarita.
I nod along, take notes on my phone, and feel almost competent until she hands me a laminated sheet with a smile that's trying too hard to look casual.
"House drinks. Figured you'd want it in writing."
The lamination gets me somewhere soft and unprepared for it. Ratios, garnish notes, even a little diagram of how to rim a glass, all sealed under plastic, like she knew exactly what kind of person she just hired.
"You laminated this." My voice comes out thicker than intended.
"I laminate everything. Ask Troy." She shrugs like it's nothing, already moving on to the register, but I catch the small pleased look before she turns away, the look of someone who noticed the plastic sleeve thing wasn't a red flag after all, it was a language, and she just spoke it back to me.
I clip a pen to my apron before my first customer orders anything.
By hour two, I've annotated Ainsley's sheet within an inch of its life.
A margin note about ice ratios. A second margin note correcting my first margin note.
A tiny arrow pointing to a whiskey sour reminding myself, in block letters, DRY SHAKE FIRST, YOU ANIMAL, after the first attempt sprays foam across the bar top and onto a man who did not order foam with his drink.
"You built a cheat sheet for the cheat sheet," Ainsley says, watching me highlight something in yellow.
"I contain multitudes."
"You contain a fire hazard is what you contain." She nods at the laminated sheet, now bristling with sticky flags. "It's not a bad system, though. Weirdly."
Weirdly is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but I'll take it.
The Old Fashioned becomes my personal nemesis somewhere around six o'clock.
Muddle the sugar, three dashes of bitters, one large cube, and I get every single element right except the part where it comes together into something a customer wants to drink.
My third attempt tastes like a candle. My fourth attempt is, inexplicably, worse.
"Ainsley." I hold up the glass like evidence in a trial. "Taste this and tell me what I did."
She takes a sip, considers it with the face of a woman being diplomatic. "It has notes."
"Notes of what?"
"Regret, mostly."
I dump it and start over, because starting over is the one skill eight years of corporate life actually prepared me for.
Lottie, who is the well known town busy body, arrives at seven with a cane in one hand and a tin of banana bread in the other, and takes the stool closest to the register like she's reserved it since birth, which, judging by the way the waitress Belinda greets her, she probably has.
"New girl," Lottie says, studying me over her reading glasses with the specific intensity of a woman assembling a dossier. "Ainsley says you're the marketing gal turned bartender."
"That's me. Learning as I go." I gesture vaguely at the mess of sticky flags on my laminated sheet, in case the visual helps.
"Mm." Lottie's not looking at the sheet.
She's looking past me, over my shoulder, toward the door, where Archer's standing in his usual spot doing his usual thing of looking like a piece of furniture that could also kill someone if it needed to, except right now the furniture is watching me pour a beer with the focused attention of a man studying for an exam. "He knows you're new?"
"Everyone knows I'm new. I broke a glass forty minutes ago."
"That's not what I asked." She sets the banana bread on the bar like a peace offering, or bait, and doesn't take her eyes off Archer for a full three seconds, long enough that I turn to check what she's seeing.
He looks away half a beat too late to pretend he wasn't looking in the first place. "Huh."
"Huh? What?"
"Nothing." The word comes out unconvincing, wrapped around a smile she's not bothering to hide. "Man's been standing at that door for six months looking like he's guarding a bank vault. Tonight he's restocked the same napkin shelf three times."
"He likes napkins."
"He likes something." She pats the stool beside her like she's inviting a witness to the stand. "Sit a minute. Tell Lottie about yourself."
I don’t sit. I have four tickets up and an Old Fashioned that's personally offended me, and also I don’t trust the specific gleam in Lottie's eye, the gleam of a woman who has never once in her life minded her own business and sees no reason to start now.
Archer checks in around eight, which I only notice because I've started keeping track, a habit I refuse to examine too closely, given how well that worked out for Beck.
"You're doing that thing again," I tell him over the bar, low enough that it stays between us.
"What thing?"
"The door guy business thing. Where you find a reason to be standing near the register that has nothing to do with the door."
"Restocking napkins." He holds up a stack of napkins like Exhibit A, entirely unbothered.
"We have four hundred napkins back there."
"Four hundred and twelve, now." He sets the stack down without looking at it again, eyes on my hands instead, on the shaker I'm holding wrong, apparently, based on the small twitch at the corner of his mouth. "You're going to dislocate something doing it like that."
"I have a system."
"You have a grip that's going to end your bartending career in one shift.
" He doesn't reach for it. Doesn't correct me outright, doesn't take the shaker from my hands the way I half expect, half want him to.
Just watches, amused, patient, letting me flail my way through it like he's got all night to enjoy the show. "Wrist, not shoulder."
I adjust my wrists. The drink comes out marginally less violent.
"There it is." Something that isn't quite a smile moves across his face and disappears again before I can call it one. "Spreadsheets."
The nickname lands differently in front of an actual bar full of actual people than it did over text at one in the morning, and heat climbs up my neck fast enough that Belinda glances over from the taps, eyebrows already halfway up her forehead.
He walks back to the door before I can respond to any of it, which I'm suspecting is the point.
The rush hits around nine, and I discover four tickets is nothing compared to eleven tickets, that my laminated sheet is not built for eleven tickets, that eleven tickets turns a color-coded system into something closer to a hostage situation.
I put the wrong garnish on two drinks in a row.
I call a whiskey neat a whiskey sour out loud, to the customer's face, with total confidence, and have to talk it back mid-sentence.
Somewhere in the chaos I knock a full rack of clean glasses half off the back counter, catch it with my hip in a move that will bruise spectacularly by morning, and don't spill a single one, which feels like it should count for something.
Archer appears at my elbow for as long as it takes to right the rack, no comment, no lecture, hands steady and quick, gone again before I've finished registering he was there at all.
"You don't have to keep doing that," I say to his back.
"Doing what?"
"The ten-second rescue thing. Where you fix something and vanish before I can say thank you."
"Wasn't a rescue." He doesn't turn around. "Was a rack."
"That's not an answer."
"Wasn't meant to be one." And he's back at the door, arms crossed, looking for all the world like a man who hasn't moved in an hour, and I'm left holding a shaker I'm gripping wrong on purpose now, just to see if he notices again.
He notices again. Says nothing. Just watches, that same low, patient amusement, like he's got nowhere better to be than a front-row seat to my slow-motion disaster.
By close, I've broken one glass, mislabeled four drinks, bruised a hip, annotated a laminated cheat sheet into something closer to a legal brief, and somehow, against every metric I would've used a month ago to measure a good day, had the best night I've had in longer than I want to admit out loud.
Lottie catches me on her way out, cane tapping the floor with the confidence of a woman who's been waiting all night for exactly this moment.
"I'm starting a pool," she announces to me, to Ainsley, to the general vicinity of the bar, loud enough that Archer's head turns from the door.
"Not on whether you break another glass, though I'll take side bets on that too.
On you two." A gesture, cane and all, sweeping between me and the man currently pretending very hard to be interested in the lock on the front door.
"Odds are three weeks. Belinda has it at five days, but Belinda's an optimist about the wrong things.
Ace is overly optimistic and has it later tonight. "
"Lottie." My entire face is on fire. "There is no pool. There is no us."
"Mm-hm." She pats my arm on her way past, unconvinced, entirely delighted. "Three weeks, honey. Write it down somewhere. You like writing things down."
She's out the door before I can argue further, banana bread tin empty on the bar, leaving me standing there with a laminated cheat sheet in one hand and the distinct, mortifying sense that everyone in this building except me has already read the last chapter of a book I haven't started writing yet.